Participatory Sensing is an idea of the society (the groups of people) for providing sensory information. The idea of participatory sensing arises from the improvement of sensor enabled mobile phones in the last few years, which made participatory sensing feasible on a large-scale. The present mobile phone apart from their conventional communication facilities, are equipped with a variety of sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, Global Position System (GPS) etc. Thus by collecting and aggregating data from plurality of phones sensors in a similar location, important estimations on road, traffic congestion, weather conditions, ecological information, and any other sensory information can be obtained. This approach resolves the problem of installing and monitoring roadside sensors. Moreover, decision making can be done by reading several sensors, which makes the approach more reliable.
The challenge in participatory sensing lies in the optimum and effective utilization of mobile phone sensors. In order to make effective utilization of mobile phone sensors, the fact that the applications use minimum mobile phone resources, must be taken into consideration. The unsafe collection of information poses further challenges to the authenticity of transmitted information. Individual sensors may require a trusted platform or hierarchical trust structures. Additional challenges include, but are not limited to, security, and privacy.
In traditional approach for monitoring traffic conditions, participatory sensing based solution for traffic condition monitoring uses the inbuilt sensors like microphone sensor, accelerometer sensor, GPS sensors etc., of users' mobile phones for traffic condition monitoring. The major problem in these participatory sensing approaches is that some sensors like microphone or GPS consumes huge amount of battery power. The conventional systems do not pay attention to the power consumption issue of mobile phones.
Traditionally, the general power consumptions of the mobile phone sensors have been estimated, from which it can be inferred that sensors like microphones and GPS consume huge amount of battery power of the mobile device. Accelerometer, on the other hand consumes very less power. Thus, if some logic is derived to turn on and off the high power consuming sensors using continuous monitoring of the low power consuming sensors, then the overall power consumption of the system can be significantly reduced.